The View from the Show

2004 will see the introduction of the first major change in PC form factor and design in years. We’ve been using the ATX standard (in various sizes and flavors) for a very long time, but now we’re finally poised to make the transition to BTX, formally known by the codename “Bigwater.” Intel has demonstrated some prototype cases many times before, but it was neat to check out all the different designs made possible by the new spec and gawk at the inline “wind tunnel” style CPU cooling vent. We can only hope that some of the first real products that use the BTX standard are as practical and creative as Intel’s samples.

The replacement for the aging AC ’97 audio codec will be called HDA (High-Definition Audio) and Intel was displaying a couple of Grantsdale motherboards with different HDA codecs installed. The demos were fairly pedestrian  the Technology Showcase floor isn’t the best place to demo audio  but a few neat capabilities were shown off. HDA allows for both port autosensing and re-mapping, so one demo quickly alternated between using all the jacks for 7.1 audio and dual independent stereo outputs. At less than 10%, CPU utilization was fairly small, but performance will depend on the codec maker and how well-optimized their software is. Dolby unveiled an HDA logo program at the show as well.

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